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| Islam and the West are Inadequate
Banners Edward Said The Observer, 16 September 2001 Spectacular horror of the sort that struck New York (and to a lesser degree Washington) has ushered in a new world of unseen, unknown assailants, terror missions without political message, senseless destruction. For the residents of this wounded city, the consternation, fear, and sustained sense of outrage and shock will certainly continue for a long time, as will the genuine sorrow and affliction that so much carnage has so cruelly imposed on so many. New Yorkers have been fortunate that Mayor
Rudy Giuliani, a normally rebarbative and unpleasantly combative, even
retrograde figure, has rapidly attained Churchillian status. Calmly,
unsentimentally, and with extraordinary compassion, he has marshalled the
city's heroic police, fire and emergency services to admirable effect and,
alas, with huge loss of life. Giuliani's was the first voice of caution
against panic and jingoistic attacks on the city's large Arab and Muslim
communities, the first to express the commonsense of anguish, the first to
press everyone to try to resume life after the shattering blows. Would that that were all. The national
television reporting has of course brought the horror of those dreadful
winged juggernauts into every household, unremittingly, insistently, not
always edifyingly. Most commentary has stressed, indeed magnified, the
expected and the predictable in what most Americans feel: terrible loss,
anger, outrage, a sense of violated vulnerability, a desire for vengeance
and un-restrained retribution. Beyond formulaic expressions of grief and
patriotism, every politician and accredited pundit or expert has dutifully
repeated how we shall not be defeated, not be deterred, not stop until
terrorism is exterminated. This is a war against terrorism, everyone says,
but where, on what fronts, for what concrete ends? No answers are
provided, except the vague suggestion that the Middle East and Islam are
what 'we' are up against, and that terrorism must be destroyed. What is most
depressing, however, is how little time is spent trying to understand
America's role in the world, and its direct involvement in the complex
reality beyond the two coasts that have for so long kept the rest of the
world extremely distant and virtually out of the average American's mind.
You'd think that 'America' was a sleeping giant rather than a superpower
almost constantly at war, or in some sort of conflict, all over the
Islamic domains. Osama bin Laden's name and face have become so numbingly
familiar to Americans as in effect to obliterate any history he and his
shadowy followers might have had before they became stock symbols of
everything loathsome and hateful to the collective imagination.
Inevitably, then, collective passions are being funnelled into a drive for
war that uncannily resembles Captain Ahab in pursuit of Moby Dick, rather
than what is going on, an imperial power injured at home for the first
time, pursuing its interests systematically in what has become a suddenly
reconfigured geography of conflict, without clear borders, or visible
actors. Manichaean symbols and apocalyptic scenarios are bandied about
with future consequences and rhetorical restraint thrown to the winds. Rational understanding of the situation is
what is needed now, not more drum-beating. George Bush and his team
clearly want the latter, not the former. Yet to most
people in the Islamic and Arab worlds the official US is synonymous with
arrogant power, known for its sanctimoniously munificent support not only
of Israel but of numerous repressive Arab regimes, and its inattentiveness
even to the possibility of dialogue with secular movements and people who
have real grievances. Anti-Americanism in this context is not based on a
hatred of modernity or technology-envy: it is based on a narrative of
concrete interventions, specific depredations and, in the cases of the
Iraqi people's suffering under US-imposed sanctions and US support for the
34-year-old Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Israel
is now cynically exploiting the American catastrophe by intensifying its
military occupation and oppression of the Palestinians. Political rhetoric
in the US has overridden these things by flinging about words like
'terrorism' and 'freedom' whereas, of course, such large abstractions have
mostly hidden sordid material interests, the influence of the oil, defense
and Zionist lobbies now consolidating their hold on the entire Middle
East, and an age-old religious hostility to (and ignorance of) 'Islam'
that takes new forms every day. Intellectual responsibility, however,
requires a still more critical sense of the actuality. There has been
terror of course, and nearly every struggling modern movement at some
stage has relied on terror. This was as true of Mandela's ANC as it was of
all the others, Zionism included. And yet bombing defenseless civilians
with F-16s and helicopter gunships has the same structure and effect as
more conventional nationalist terror. What is bad about all
terror is when it is attached to religious and political abstractions and
reductive myths that keep veering away from history and sense. This is
where the secular consciousness has to try to make itself felt, whether in
the US or in the Middle East. No cause, no God, no abstract idea can
justify the mass slaughter of innocents, most particularly when only a
small group of people are in charge of such actions and feel themselves to
represent the cause without having a real mandate to do so. Besides, much as it has been quarreled over
by Muslims, there isn't a single Islam: there are Islams, just as there
are Americas. This diversity is true of all traditions, religions or
nations even though some of their adherents have futilely tried to draw
boundaries around themselves and pin their creeds down neatly. Yet history
is far more complex and contradictory than to be represented by demagogues
who are much less representative than either their followers or opponents
claim. The trouble with religious or moral fundamentalists is that today
their primitive ideas of revolution and resistance, including a
willingness to kill and be killed, seem all too easily attached to
technological sophistication and what appear to be gratifying acts of
horrifying retaliation. The New York and Washington suicide bombers seem
to have been middle-class, educated men, not poor refugees. Instead
of getting a wise leadership that stresses education, mass mobilisation
and patient organization in the service of a cause, the poor and the
desperate are often conned into the magical thinking and quick bloody
solutions that such appalling models provide, wrapped in lying religious
claptrap. On the other hand, immense
military and economic power are no guarantee of wisdom or moral vision.
Skeptical and humane voices have been largely unheard in the present
crisis, as 'America' girds itself for a long war to be fought somewhere
out there, along with allies who have been pressed into service on very
uncertain grounds and for imprecise ends. We need to step back from the
imaginary thresholds that separate people from each other and re-examine
the labels, reconsider the limited resources available, decide to share
our fates with each other as cultures mostly have done, despite the
bellicose cries and creeds. 'Islam' and 'the West' are simply inadequate as banners to follow blindly. Some will run behind them, but for future generations to condemn themselves to prolonged war and suffering without so much as a critical pause, without looking at interdependent histories of injustice and oppression, without trying for common emancipation and mutual enlightenment seems far more willful than necessary. Demonization of the Other is not a sufficient basis for any kind of decent politics, certainly not now when the roots of terror in injustice can be addressed, and the terrorists isolated, deterred or put out of business. It takes patience and education, but is more worth the investment than still greater levels of large-scale violence and suffering. Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/ |